


the verb for I (the Rosetta Stone remix)

by schweet_heart



Series: Merlin Fic [86]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War I, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Epistolary, M/M, Master/Servant, Mutual Pining, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining, Reincarnation, Separations, Sexual Repression, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 06:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12742740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart
Summary: They had planned to go to war together, the two of them, joined at the hip like part of Plato’s Sacred Band. Arthur might have considered it romantic, if he was given to that sort of sentimentality, but as it was he thought only of the convenience.





	the verb for I (the Rosetta Stone remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Rosetta Stone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1421452) by [Malu_3 (Grainne)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grainne/pseuds/Malu_3). 



> many of the things the words were about  
> no longer exist
> 
> the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree  
> the verb for I
> 
> — _Losing a Language_ (W. S. Merwin)

 

 

The first word Arthur forgets is the word for home. In the training camps, they repeat it to themselves so often it ceases to have meaning: “I’ve got a girl back home,” they say; or, “I want to go— ” Home itself is no longer a place or a feeling but is defined only by negative space – a loss. Eventually, it becomes nothing at all. 

 

Arthur spends three months out at Tidworth with a group of men from Camelot, a collection of faces he has known for his entire life. In this context, they are strangers. The man who fetches his breakfast every morning used to be his under-gardener, and he still moves like he’s pruning roses, short and clipped, wary of thorns. His footmen are now training to carry rifles. Arthur himself sweats in the pale sun, carrying a pack that is far too heavy for him over distances that are far too long, and falls into his bunk at night into a sleep that is dreamless except for a pair of blue eyes and soft, dark hair. 

 

 _My calluses have calluses_ , Arthur writes to Merlin, after that first week. _Had I known being in the army would involve this much manual labour, I would have let Father talk me into signing on as his aide-de-camp when he first offered. Perhaps I should quit and become a pilot._

 

Merlin’s reply is short and predictably smug. _Considering your desperate fear of heights, my lord, I’ve no doubt you’re better off staying where you are. Who knows, all that exercise might be good for you. It might even teach you to be less of a prat._

 

 

* 

 

 

They had planned to go to war together, the two of them, joined at the hip like part of Plato’s Sacred Band. Arthur might have considered it romantic, if he was given to that sort of sentimentality, but as it was he thought only of the convenience.

 

“At least that way I’ll have someone by me who knows how to brew a proper cup of tea,” he said, when he eventually broached the idea to Merlin. “Father wants me to become an officer, and they’ll let me bring you as my batman, if you join up. We can stay together.”

 

“And that’s all you need me for, is it?” Merlin had asked, with one of those sidelong smiles of his that Arthur has never been quite sure how to read. “Someone to shine your shoes, polish your buttons, make sure your tea is never cold?”

 

“Don’t sell yourself short, _Mer_ lin.” Arthur smirked at him in the mirror. “You forget, I’ll also need someone to spill soup on my uniform, and drop my cap in the mud. I can’t be expected to do everything myself.”

 

They had planned to go to war together, but it turns out Merlin has dicky lungs, or as Arthur puts it, “doesn’t breathe well under pressure,” and though Merlin’s face crumples when he hears the news for Arthur it is almost a relief. It isn’t something he has wanted to talk about, but now that war is a reality the thought of Merlin on a battlefield has begun to frighten him. Merlin is tall and skinny and has knobbly knees and gentle hands, and he never quite manages to keep himself together even when he’s _not_ being fired upon by angry Germans. If Merlin were to be sent to the front he would likely end the war in a handful of days, simply by dint of being so clumsy, and Arthur would have his hands full chasing after him to make sure he didn’t get himself killed by accident. Arthur would defy anyone to watch Merlin walking into danger without trying to stop him just on principle, in the same way that any sane adult would steer a hapless child away from a raging fire, and he wonders whether Plato had considered that problem in his prescription for the perfect soldier. 

 

The Thebans couldn’t have thought very far, really, making an army of lovers. 

 

 

 *

 

 

In Étaples, there is little to do but sleep, and march, and sleep again, and the days begin to blur into one another. In snatched moments between combat training and drill routines, he reads and rereads Merlin’s letters until the creases are soft and the ink has faded, tracing the mischief of Merlin’s smiles in the untidy loops of his l’s and the tail of each y. 

 

What he’s really looking for amidst the hastily blotted pages are the things that Merlin doesn’t say, and can’t in all good conscience commit to print. They hadn’t discussed what it meant that Arthur was leaving until the night before he was due at the station, and even then Arthur had not been able to bring himself to extract the promise he wanted. Had Merlin been one of Arthur’s friends from Eton, he would have known what to do, could have manhandled him into something close to the friendship — courtship — relationship he wanted, but Merlin is strange, and prickly, and although they understand each other well enough in most things in this they both somehow remain resolutely ignorant. 

 

Before Merlin, Arthur had not even begun to think of servants as individual people with complex emotions and feelings; after Merlin, Arthur is no longer entitled enough to presume nor brave enough to risk what he already has, so in all his letters home he never asks.  

 

 

 *

 

 

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t _want_. When they are finally sent out to the front and Arthur discovers just how good he is at killing, it’s Merlin he wants to talk to about the blood on his hands. When George shaves him and brings his tea in the mornings, it is Merlin’s light, irreverent touches that he craves, Merlin’s smiles and chatter instead of the other man’s po-faced civilities.

 

It’s strange, but he comes to live with it. Sufficiency becomes another word that he forgets, to be replaced in all quarters by deprivation, paucity and want. Desire is something woven so seamlessly into the fabric of his new life that it becomes invisible and somehow tangled up with other things he doesn’t want to think about. 

 

At night, he dreams of sitting beneath an apple tree on the banks of a river, watching it fill with the souls of the dead. Here a man he has killed. There a man who had almost killed him. Death has many faces, all of them drifting past in a line, grotesque, unrecognisable. The rest of the world is mist and darkness, and it is as if Arthur has always been waiting here. As if he will never wake up.

 

 

* 

 

 

He doesn’t write to Merlin about these dreams. Instead, he writes about his men, the weather, his hopes and fears. 

 

 _I have been thinking of Camelot constantly,_ he writes, his handwriting made almost illegible by the cold. _Did Father manage to have the cottages repaired before the snow? Is Morgana still determined to one day run the world? You must tell me all your news, for it feels like forever since I have been home._

 

Merlin replies at some length, describing how difficult it had become to find a competent builder under the age of sixty with so many men away at war; how Morgana had vowed to become a nurse, and had spent a full day locked in a screaming match with Uther before he would grant her permission to volunteer at the local hospital.  

 

 _I believe your father thinks only of her safety_ , Merlin writes. _I have heard him say that he couldn’t bear to let her go to the front, for fear that he would lose you both. But the Lady Morgana is determined, and nothing he says will sway her now she has set upon her course. I believe she feels, as we all do—_ and here something is crossed out, with cross-hatching so dense Arthur can’t make it out — _that we must do_ something _to help, even if they will not permit us to fight_.

 

Merlin’s letters are full of warmth and humour, and he has a keen eye for detail; next to being there himself, Arthur could not wish for a fuller account of the comings and goings at Camelot House. 

 

And yet, Merlin himself remains elusive. He speaks only in the barest detail about his life, and as Arthur’s father and sister write but rarely, Arthur has no one to turn to for news. It’s ridiculous, he knows, but as the winter takes hold in earnest he finds himself kept sleepless and on edge, listening to the artillery in the distance and wondering if Merlin is happy. Wondering whether, on some bleak, empty day after this one or the next, a letter will arrive with the news that he has found someone else to love — a girl, maybe, pretty and petite; someone who can return his affections with pride instead of pushing him away for fear that people will talk.

 

Someone, in short, who is nothing like Arthur.

 

 

 *

 

 

In desperation, he writes to an old family friend, the village doctor, who is also Merlin’s uncle. He tries to disguise his concern as friendly interest, an inquiry about the nephew of a man his father holds in high esteem, the sort of thing his tutors would have approved of, but of course such politely worded inquiries will not return the five little words he most wants to hear.

 

 _Merlin sends his regards_ , the old man says, in a few short lines at the end of his letter. _He was most relieved to have a good account of you, as are we all. The shortage of workers up at the House has kept him very busy of late, and I have not seen much of him._

 

There is no letter from Merlin for almost a month after that, and Arthur does not write to Gaius again. 

 

 

 *

 

 

Spring thaws the ground, and brings with it the slush, which is almost worse than snow. Water gets everywhere, trickling down his neck and into his boots, soaking his socks and chilling his feet. Arthur and his men keep dry as best they can, blessing the gradually warming temperatures even as they curse the damp and the rot, and the war thunders slowly, inevitably on, ripping apart everything that stands in its way. 

 

In the midst of this devastation, Merlin’s letters are like wildflowers, brightening his days with unexpected colour. The things he writes about seem like impossibilities. A village fete. New lambs in the fields. Here it is impossible to think of new life in the midst of so much death, and yet it will keep growing, through and around and over them. 

 

Meanwhile, Arthur forgets what it’s like to live in a world where clean means soft linens and the scent of soap, and instead comes to fully inhabit his own dirty skin, the kick of his heart when the order comes to go over the top, the way his nails dig into his fists on the nights when it’s too quiet and he’s waiting to hear the sound of guns.

 

He forgets safety. He forgets hope.

 

He holds onto Merlin and his letters in spite of it all, in case he should forget him too.

 

 

* 

 

 

And then, inevitably: what used to be an orchard, the old trees now stripped bare, the land churned into thick brown mud by uncaring boots and artillery shells. A low-lying mist hangs over the scene like a miasma, and Arthur is struck by the stillness of it. As if it’s been lying in wait. 

 

He knows before the guns begin to fire that they’re cut off; he knows before the bullet hits him that he is going to die. 

 

 

 *

 

 

Arthur dreams of mud, and water. 

 

Merlin is standing at the edge of a lake casting stones towards a tiny island with an obelisk in the centre. “Will you come back?” he asks.

 

“Will you be here?” Arthur replies.

 

The stones cause ripples in the water, but, as ever, Merlin does not respond.

 

 

* 

 

 

He wakes up in hospital. Time has passed: outside the window, green things are beginning to unfurl, and he recognises, if not his exact location, then the bone-deep sense of safety that has been absent for so long. 

 

For a moment, there is disorientation. The war is a small and distant thing, and then it is nothing at all, a blankness inside his memory. Arthur is still under the apple tree, the silence ringing strangely in his ears.

 

They tell him he is lucky to be alive. The bullet missed his heart by inches; punctured his lung. He can still breathe, but not well, and Arthur wonders at the irony. He hasn’t drawn a proper breath in years.

 

Morgana visits. At first, he doesn’t recognise her in uniform; then he doesn’t recognise her face. Her dark hair is pulled back, severe, her pale face going even paler when she sees him.

 

“Father will come as soon as he can,” she tells him, fussing unnecessarily with his blankets. “There’s trouble at the War Office; he’s needed. But he’ll see you soon.”

 

When Uther does come, he has nothing to say. 

 

“Where are my things?” Arthur asks. “I had— there were letters.”

 

“I’m afraid they must have been destroyed, son,” Uther says indifferently. “They won’t have been important, surely?”

 

When he looks at him, Arthur recognises only his eyes: cold, distant, almost afraid. He holds onto Arthur’s hand and doesn’t speak, and Arthur doesn’t know how to explain that the letters were important, very important, and that he feels like there’s something missing but does not know why.

 

 

 

 *

 

 

 

The war ends for Arthur on the 26th of August, 1917. His father sends a car for him at the station, and for the first time Arthur recognises a face without prompting.

 

“Lancelot,” he says: tentative, hoping. The man smiles in response and opens the door for him, touching his cap. 

 

“Welcome home, Master Pendragon, sir.”

 

The drive takes them through twisting lanes, deep into the English countryside. For once, the weather is hot and humid, heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and gorse. Arthur knows they’re getting close by the way it feels, as if he’s coming up through water on a bright day, his scarred lungs heaving as he sucks in air.

 

 

*

 

 

There is a man standing outside the manor gates. Expectant.

 

“Lance,” Arthur says, with sudden certainty. “Stop here.”

 

The car pulls over onto the shoulder, and Arthur waits a moment before he gets out, already certain he’ll hear the sound of footsteps running towards him.

 

Merlin’s eyes are the colour of wildflowers.

 

“You came back,” he whispers, touching Arthur’s face. “You’re here.” He doesn’t sound like he believes it.

 

Arthur gropes for the things he’s lost: breath, clarity, direction, and finally he finds the words in the taste of Merlin’s mouth, crisp as an apple, made sweeter as he murmurs against Arthur’s lips _,_ “I was waiting for you.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Dear malu_3,
> 
> So I know you've already received your Remix fic, but I found this attempt in my drafts and wanted to finish it. I hope you don't mind! I really loved the original and it didn't seem right just to leave this languishing on my hard drive forever <33


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